To Whom It May Concern...

Instead of Impress... Okay, Century Color Online forms, has been the bane of my existance in some regards. Never enough, always updating, never easy to work in. I was ready to hate ASP .Net simply because I never wanted to look at it again after working on these forms. That's because I was being idiotic. (No, I'm not an idiot, just naive.) For example, our Review order page. Basically, it was a simple page that used this: Dim objRequest As System.Net.WebRequest = System.Net.HttpWebRequest.Create(url) objResponse = objRequest.GetResponse() Dim sr As New System.IO.StreamReader(objResponse.GetResponseStream()) Now, do you follow what that did? It did an HTTPWebRequest into a StreamReader. Then I stripped out all the form tags and other undesirable tags and other bad tags, and dumped the resulting huge string into a label control. At the time I thought it was pretty ingenious. Until of course I wanted that form to do stuff. Today, in 2 lines of code, (and remo...

Added another link, don't know why I didn't have it before. It's an article on the 4 Guys from Rolla site. Enjoy.

I knew that user controls couldn't be that difficult. They aren't. I'm working on simplifying code. I have several forms I work on, they have slightly different layouts, depending on what type of order the user is placing. But some of the controls, and therefore code, get duplicated. I am working to unify the code, making it easier. Therefore, I have added a link on my Technical Links page . One other point... who's idea was it to so tightly pack coffee filters together! You really think they're useable after separating them first thing in the morning, with bleary eyes and fumbling fingers?!?!

Yesterday, about 5PM I went out to get groceries. Got back about 6 and noticed footprints in the snow. I looked around, cause I'm a little suspicous of footprints, and they went around the house, so I figured they were the landlord's. Went to my book study at about 7:15, and came back about 8:45PM. At 10:30, as my wife was covering our bird, she looked out the window. This was the living room window. Since we just moved in, it just had sheer, lacey, curtains, so she could look right out. She asked me if I had walked up to the window. I hadn't. So I go out and look, and realize there is a new set of foot prints, similar to the first set, coming right up to and looking in our window. Definetly not our landlord. So, needless to say, we were creeped out. The worst part is, my wife was home alone while I was at the book study. Thankfully nothing happened, except that we didn't get to sleep until after 1AM. We called the police and left a report, barricaded the front do...

Please click the link below to vote for the type of pirate I am. Just to help you vote: Okay, the two people who bothered to vote have voted, and I have decided I'm just a regular, run-of-the-mill, Jimmey Buffet kind of pirate.

In my previous post I mentioned how I needed to save some settings. I found this article on MSDN that helped me to write a class that reads and writes app settings to the CommonApplicationData area. It's pretty slick. I added on to what they had by checking for the path first, and if necessary, creating the directory and file.

Whoa boy... Thanks Ian for your help. I wanted to save user settings for my app, in this case, the path to another app that they would need to use. That's no problem', I thought, figuring it I'd just dump it into the app.config file with the deployment settings. Ian posted this great article that taught me otherwise. Instead, I'm going to roll my own AppSettings class, and save it in the users ApplicationData folder. Check it out... It's a good idea considering security is tightening everywhere.

Ben Mawoo gota 56. Here's mine:

This article made me laugh, a feat no article had done in quite some time. This is what I thought was funny: "I don't even know who the candidates are other than Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), let alone this Gere," Gaza soap factory worker Manar an-Najar told Reuters on Wednesday. "We don't need the Americans' intervention. We know who to elect. Not like them -- they elected a moron." And then there's this one . Reminds me of this video clip .

Ace FTP might be the first FTP software I ever buy. It's so simple, but has so many powerfull features. This FTP software let's you drag and drop, auto queues files, and will even give you a throughput graph for starters. And, if you're on dial-up and need to save some bandwidth while it transfers in the background, you can throtle the throughput. Check it out here .

Saturday my grandfather passed away. Here is his obituary .

I have a new phone #. I still don't have a cable jack in my office. And my grandfather died this evening. Now I am on the phone with Netzero who made unauthorized withdrawels from my account. Fun day.

Ah, to end from that wearisome nomadic feeling. What a trip. I'm here in my new office, coffee brewing in the kitchen, cable running up the hall from my bedroom to said office so that my cable modem can connect. Why? Well, after 4 visits, a signed letter from my landlord, and me finally taking a hammer drill to the wall, I still don't have a jack in the wall of my office. I can't go into the cable company's lock box, and they can't do it without a work order. Oh the red tape. How about the move itself? Well, Friday was an adventure of stairs and stacking... won't go any more into that. Saturday, got started 45 minutes later than we wanted, but ended up down here 4 hours later. Multiple stops to tie down the tarp on my fathers truck in a fruitless effort. Plus one 2 1/2 hour diversion in Lords Valley PA, to replace the tire on the moving truck. A nice big spike, screw with a hex head, got lodged in the front right tire. Happily, there was a guy 1/2 mile down t...

I guess I forgot to post it, in all the hustle and the bustle. I finished the project, or at least the portion I needed to. I was able to handle events from the Kodak 14n and copy the file to the hard drive. Now adays, everything is WIA, TWAIN, or mass storage device. Kodak makes it hard. Oh well, it works. I have to wrap up some stuff, and then incorporate it into Data.Match, but I'm glad it's done. Check out this long Channel9 post .

Today, Friday the 24th we loaded the truck. Other than having my bro almost drop a couch on me, we're doing ok. We cleaned the apartment, went out to eat with my folks, and tomorrow we'll all head down to PA. I'm blogging from my parents where my wife and I will be staying. Boy I'm tired. Got a 6 hour drive, and unloading. At least it's 1st floor, not 2nd like the one we emptied today. Guess I should check my e-mail.

I'm sure many people can't wait for me to pack up and move to PA, specifically those on the forums I've been harassing. But my project is almost done. My code recieves events from the unmanaged code, once. After that, the unmanaged code seems to hang. However, when my code closes and get's GC'd, I get errors from the unmanaged code that it can't "Read" from memory. One error message for every event that should have fired. On the lighter side, I thought I'd post something for all those who think it's wise to teach your kids to lie from an early age. 'It's only a little lie.' Christmas Trivia 1. The average American takes six months to pay off holiday credit-card bills. 2. What is Pogonophobia: The fear of beards. 3. There are currently 78 people named S. Claus living in the U.S. -- and one Kriss Kringle. (But many Krispe Kremes) 4. December is the most popular month for nose jobs. 5. Weight of Santa's slei...

This is the last step I need to complete before I leave. I just need to catch the events. Now I don't get an exception, but I know the events have to be firing. Why doesn't the unmanaged code fire my code!!! Am I passing the wrong thing?!?! Help please! Check out the details here.

I'm posting everything I've got for this project. Here's the link . Please, please, please, I have one last part, and 2 days to do it. You can look at the last post on this blog to see what I'm having problems with.

I finally got images off this stupid Kodak camera. Only 1 task left, but I'll let you see what I've done so far. 'Get a handle to the directory myStatus = Me.KAllocDirItemByPath(myCameraRef, myFolder, myDir) 'Allocate a direcotry iterator for that folder If myStatus = 0 Then myStatus = Me.KAllocDirectoryIter(myDir, myDirIter) 'Iterate to the next directory item myStatus = Me.KIteratorNext(myDirIter, myDirItem) Do Until myStatus 0 ... Loop I set it up this way. You have to get a handle to directory, passing in a string for the path name. (ie. "Camera\Card1\DCIM\FolderName\") Then you get an iterator, and walk the iterator for the different files. In my loop I have this code: 'Create a handle to the source file myStatus = Me.KAllocIORef(myDirItem, mySrcIO) 'Create the handle to the file. The handle is a fileStream(fStream).handle fStream = New IO.FileStre...

// Pointer to tranfser buffer unsigned char* theBuffer = NULL; In .Net (Visual Basic) how do I do that?